Introduction to the Sonnet VIII: Spondaic (and Pyrrhic) Substitution

When I said in a previous post that adding a stressed syllable to a line changed its meter, I lied. Or rather, I did not lie, but I was not completely truthful either, because I ignored one exceptional case: spondaic substitution. Similarly, when I said a line was organized around its stressed syllables, I ignored the spondee's little brother, the pyrrhic, and the idea of a pyrrhic substitution.

A spondee is a foot consisting of two stressed syllables (DUM DUM) and a pyrrhic a foot of two unstressed syllables (dum dum). They are both holdovers from Greek and Latin quantitative meter, where syllable length, rather than stress or accent, governed poetry - a spondee was two longs and a pyrrhic two shorts. No meter uses either foot exclusively, and pyrrhic feet are very rare, particularly so in English meter. This is because while two short syllables making a foot is rare-but-possible, accentual or stress-based meters like the ones in English poetry really demand stresses somewhere in the foot simply because the language is uncomfortable with too many unstressed syllables in a row and will throw in a minor stress just to relieve the tension. So I will leave pyrrhic feet and substitutions out of it, as they are practically never seen; if you want to use one, be exceedingly careful, and know that it may not have stress, but it will be highly marked.

Spondees, however, are much less uncommon. Words can be spondaic - baseball, sandwich, ping-pong - and lines can easily have one (and rarely, in English, more) spondaic foot substituted for an iamb or a trochee: "the BASE/BALL PLAY/er SPLIT/his BAT/in TWO" is iambic pentameter with a spondaic substitution in the second foot. This is the only case I can think of in which another stressed syllable is introduced into a line without changing the basic meter (ie turning a pentameter into a hexameter). This is because the extra stress is contained within a pre-existing foot.

Spondaic feet are marked, but only heavily so if they end a line, if there are several in a row, or if they verge (because in English even spondees often have slightly higher stress on one of the two stressed words) on flipping a foot from iamb to trochee or vice-versa. They do occur; they tend to add weight and emphasis to a line, and lines with spondees tend to sound heavy and serious (or at least more so than surrounding lines; I'm sure the example above was frivolous enough). This effect is strongest in the aforementioned heavily marked cases, and lightest where the spondee comes early in the line - as in my example. Spondees can be a useful weapon in the poet's arsenal, and I should not have given them short shrift before.